INHUMAN TRADE: Sex, shame, violence, control

Wednesday

Aug 9, 2017 at 11:42 AMAug 9, 2017 at 11:43 AM

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a series of stories exploring human trafficking in Massachusetts. The series delves into the widespread commercial sex trade in our cities and suburbs, the online marketplaces where pimps and johns buy and sell sex, cases of modern-day slavery and victims’ tales of survival.

Gerry Tuoti Wicked Local Newsbank Editor

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of stories exploring human trafficking in Massachusetts. The series will delve into the widespread commercial sex trade in our cities and suburbs, the online marketplaces where pimps and johns buy and sell sex, cases of modern-day slavery and victims’ tales of survival.

When Jasmine Marino was 19 years old, she thought she was in love, and she was willing to do nearly anything for her man -- even sell her body.

“He would buy me things and make me feel special and loved,” the Saugus woman recalled. “We began dating and over two or three months he began to manipulate, groom and coerce me. It was very gradual.”

Desperate for her boyfriend’s affection, taken in by his empty promises and impressed by material wealth, she slowly came around to his increasingly frequent suggestions that they could make a lot of money if she started selling herself for sex. She soon found herself traveling to massage parlors throughout New England, turning tricks and handing the money over to her boyfriend -- a man she now calls her pimp.

It didn’t take long for her to decide that life wasn’t for her, but by then it was too late.

“I was disgusted, horrified, ashamed. I couldn’t take it,” Marino said. “I told him I didn’t want to do this anymore, and that’s when he started using violence.”

After years of abuse and exploitation, she started saving money a little at a time, hiding it in potted plants to conceal it from her trafficker -- she now uses the words "pimp" and "trafficker" interchangeably. At age 24, she finally found the courage to leave, but then fell into a nearly three-year cycle of drug addiction. In 2007, she finally got clean and sober for good, and now runs a support organization to help other survivors of sex trafficking.

Looking back on her experiences, she said she now realizes she was manipulated, brainwashed to the point that she lost her own identity and sense of self-worth.

Marino’s story, authorities and advocates say, is all too typical in the commercial sex trade. The underground world of sex, violence and psychological coercion is becoming nearly as common in the suburbs as in the cities, as pimps and johns peruse adult classified websites to buy and sell sex, often arranging to meet in hotels, private homes or massage parlors.

“My hope is that … people are realizing that this isn’t a victimless crime, that no little girl grows up dreaming to be sold and sold and sold and that there is a way to go after this, and that there’s a law in place and we’re going to enforce it and that we’re going to go after the issue hard,” said Attorney General Maura Healey.

The International Labor Organization estimates that forced labor and human trafficking are a $150 billion industry worldwide. Human trafficking is defined as holding or transporting people, often by use of force, fraud or coercion, for commercial or sexual exploitation. The term is often associated with prostitution, but experts say there have also been human trafficking cases involving nannies, housekeepers and construction workers.

The Polaris Project, a national organization dedicated to ending human trafficking, runs a national hotline that provides help and services to victims of trafficking. Last year, the hotline got 279 calls just from Massachusetts, and reports of 88 separate human trafficking cases statewide. Of those cases, 72 involved sex trafficking.

Those reports, however, represent just a small fraction of trafficking cases, according to experts. Victims’ fear and shame, they say, often make them reluctant to come forward to authorities, making human trafficking a severely under-reported crime.

A legal shift

In 2011, Massachusetts became the 48th state in the country to pass a human trafficking law, giving authorities greater power to prosecute pimps as traffickers. Since the law took effect in 2012, the AG’s office has charged 35 people with human trafficking, a criminal offense that previously wasn’t on the books at the state level. That figure does not include cases prosecuted by county district attorneys or federal authorities.

“I think the law has worked well,” Healey said. “We’ve had 35 prosecutions already, multiple defendants in the past few years, and multiple investigations just this year out of this office. And certainly others, the district attorneys, have had their own cases.”

The state law makes human trafficking a crime in Massachusetts, and sets the penalty for a conviction of trafficking for sexual servitude at up to 20 years in state prison. A person convicted of trafficking a person under the age of 18 for sex can be sentenced to up to life in prison.

State Sen. Mark Montigny, D-New Bedford, who sponsored the law, said he wants to see many more traffickers prosecuted. A challenge, he said, is that victims of trafficking are often fearful or reluctant to turn on their pimps.

Much of society, he added, is either ignorant of the problem, or still views exploited victims as criminals. More people, he said, need to realize that sex trafficking is a real problem and that it’s happening throughout Massachusetts.

“I would like to say one of the most proud moments of my life was passing a law that swept up hundreds of traffickers. I wish I could say that,” Montigny said. “That’s not an indictment of advocates for victims, of prosecutors or investigators. It’s an indictment of society.”

He also voiced frustration that a state trust fund to support victim services has just $16,000, and that his attempts to secure more resources have stalled.

“There’s a lot of people being sold, with traffickers going scot-free,” he said. “Until there are thousands of convictions .... no, I won’t be satisfied.”

Julie Dahlstrom, a clinical associate professor of law at Boston University and director of the university’s Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking program, said the Massachusetts law “has allowed cases to move forward in a way they weren’t able to before.”

“I think it has been sea-changing in the context of sex trafficking in terms of allowing prosecutors to bring charges against those involved in the commercial sex trade,” Dahlstrom said. “It has a broader definition than the federal law and has relied less on victim testimony.”

Additionally, she said, it has raised awareness that specialized services for victims are needed.

The law has coincided with a gradual evolution in law enforcement’s view of prostitution, Healey said.

“That’s been a real important cultural shift, that we’re not going to prosecute the victims here,” she said. “They’re not the wrongdoers in this. It’s the pimps, the traffickers and the buyers.”

The law is significant for several reasons, said Lisa Goldblatt-Grace, executive director of the Boston-based My Life My Choice, an organization that provides services to sexually exploited young women in eastern Massachusetts. It recognizes pimps as human sex traffickers, and it provides protections for young victims of the sex trade.

Under the 2011 law, a child under the age of 18 who is sold for sex is automatically assumed to be a victim and referred for help.

The Polaris Project used to rank Massachusetts in the bottom tier of the nation when it came to the strength of its laws. After passing the 2011 legislation, the Bay State vaulted into the top tier of the Polaris rankings.

“When we started in 2002, the girls were very much criminalized,” Goldblatt-Grace said. “They were called child prostitutes with the connotation that this was a choice, that they were promiscuous, that they were problems in the community rather than a result of problems in the community.”

Last year, My Life My Choice served 156 girls and women. The average age those girls got into the commercial sex trade? 14.

Lt. Detective Donna Gavin, head of the Boston Police Department’s Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking Unit, said traffickers typically target girls with a vulnerability that can be exploited. Vulnerabilities could include a rocky home life, past abuse or trauma, emotional distress or poverty.

“With the opiate crisis, we’ve seen young women with heroin problems being targeted by pimps,” she said. “They’re posted online, doing incalls and outcalls, making money and feeding them drugs.”

Building a case

When conducting an investigation, Gavin said she often works with multiple agencies and tries to build strong cases around the victims.

“So much of this crime is transient,” she said. “It crosses counties and state lines.”

The process of investigating and building a human trafficking case is very long and involved, said Healey.

“We’re not talking about where you sit on a corner, watch some guy walk over and hand money to a woman and they hop in the car,” Healey said. “What we’re going after are the operations that involve multiple victims and multiple buyers, dozens and dozens and dozens or hundreds of buyers.”

Healey’s office has a unit of prosecutors and state troopers dedicated to trafficking cases. And last April, Gov. Charlie Baker issued an executive order to establish a state police High Risk Victim Unit, which focuses on statewide child sex trafficking investigations.

“These are sophisticated investigations. The kind of work we need to do to get phone records, to get internet records, to get bank records -- all required through a criminal process of subpoenas -- wires, surveillance … They take weeks or months to build,” Healey said. “We have to present to a grand jury. These aren’t District Court cases where you’re just in there with a complaint that a police officer will file and, bang, there you go. These are pretty sophisticated investigations and operations.”

Other challenges, she said, include the substantial amounts of time it takes to conduct investigations and maintain relationships with victims throughout the legal process.

“I think the law is there, it is effective, it is working,” Healey said. “Some of the challenges I see are still getting the public to identify the signs of human trafficking and identifying that girl or that woman publicly and making the report.”

That includes increasing training for police officers, hospital workers and other people on the front lines to recognize signs of trafficking and exploitation, said Stephanie Clark, executive director of Amirah, an organization that runs a North Shore safe home for victims of sex trafficking.

Other approaches

Some, however, argue that prosecutors, investigators and policymakers are misplacing their priorities.

Desmond Ravenstone, a member of the Massachusetts Sex Worker Ally Network and administrator of Clients of Sex Workers Allied for Change, advocates for the decriminalization of buying and selling sex between consenting adults. The Massachusetts law, he said, “muddies the waters.”

“CoSWAC was started by sex workers, attorneys and activists like myself who were concerned with a shift where consensual sex work was being conflated with trafficking,” Ravenstone said.

While he admits sex buyers aren’t all saints, Ravenstone argues that the majority care about the well-being of prostitutes, and that they buy sex to seek physical and emotional intimacy. Decriminalizing the consensual sex trade, he argues, would increase protections for prostitutes and end the “demonizing” of men who purchase sex to fulfill a basic human need for intimacy.

Supporters of the law, however, say the psychological manipulation pimps typically use to control women and lure them into the sex trade mask the true nature of seemingly consensual sex transactions.

“The reality is women don’t necessarily see it as something that was done to me, but this is something that I did,” said Clark. “That’s the manipulation of a trafficker, the brainwashing of a trafficker who continues to beat them down mentally until they get to a point where they think, ‘This was my choice; this is the only thing I’m good at; this is who I am.’ Their identity gets wrapped up in that.”

Healey also disagrees with arguments that favor decriminalizing or legalizing the sex trade.

“It’s very real, it’s very pervasive, it’s extremely sad, and I think it partly goes to a mentality that this is prostitution, that women are willingly walking into this for a little extra money, maybe there’s even enjoyment in it -- no,” she said.

NEXT: In the second part of the series, victims of human trafficking discuss their stories of survival and their journeys out of the commercial sex trade.